Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 Review

When it's at its best, Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 puts me in a zen-like trance that few games manage to pull off. The sense of old-school arcade speed, visual pizzazz, and organized chaos that it dishes out brought me deliciously close to the edge of insanity. It just makes a few too many unnecessary tweaks and additions, and those end up muddying the waters of Pac-Man’s timeless formula.

Championship Edition 2 is crammed with options and modifiers. First, an Adventure Mode with an addictive three-star grading system slowly teaches you the new rules and mechanics via bite-sized challenges. While it’s easy to get one star on any given level, the three-star tasks took some real effort to pull off and felt really rewarding as I completed them with just seconds left on the clock. Once I learned the ropes from Adventure Mode I set my sight on the meat and potatoes of CE2: trying to top high scores in various arcade levels. The amount of freedom you have to modify variables like map size and starting speed allows you to create very specific challenges.

I really love the retro arcade visual style and insanity present across all of the dozens and dozens of levels. Neon colors stretch in all directions and the pounding bass of the soundtrack creates a tense, effective atmosphere. Destroyed ghosts explode like Fourth of July fireworks and levels transform on the fly, all adding up to a lovely level of chaos. Likewise, the way the camera zooms in and twists around when you’re on an especially solid run and eating long trains of ghosts and their minions adds a cinematic flair that made me feel way cooler than I thought a Pac-Man game could.

At times, it barely even feels like Pac-Man anymore.

However, while the original Championship Edition introduced just the right amount of new ideas to make it a Masterpiece, this follow-up stumbles in its excess by adding so many tweaks that it barely feels like Pac-Man anymore at times. Some of the additions are genuinely great – for example, I love being able use a consumable jump power-up anywhere on the map to hop back to my starting place and get out of a precarious position. Not only did this save my life on a bunch of occasions, but it allowed me to create smart new strategies that shave seconds off a run in timed challenges. There’s also the power gauge at the bottom of the screen that rewards you with fruit or power pellets, providing a nice micro-goal amidst the larger round. I also really liked the way that power pellets will actively run away from you, forcing you to chase the power-up while also avoiding the ghosts. This adds a really great layer of tension to the standard formula.

But for every cool addition, there are double the amount of new features that just feel like clutter. The chief example is the new ability to bounce off enemies a few times before they become aggro’d and kill you actively goes against one of the core tenets that Pac-Man has been built on for decades: one touch is lethal. The rules of how often you could tap an enemy without dying seemed murky because it’s based on an invisible timer between bumps, and that uncertainty added a level of randomness that hurts the original game’s fantastic binary precision. There are also boss battles against giant ghosts that provide a spectacle, but just aren’t all that much fun.

Then there are the mini-ghosts scattered across the maps that act as barriers to your run – you have to pass close by one without actually hitting it to activate it and send it to link up with a big ghost. Because entire chunks of the level are effectively cordoned off in the beginning of a run, I felt like my creative freedom and options were more limited than I’d like. Pac-Man is at its best when you’re presented with a bunch of options and have to make a split-second decision on which one to take. Far too often, maps in Championship Edition 2 felt like there was only one correct route. Finding it is still a fun challenge, but not on the same level as the style of play that made me love the first Championship Edition.

The Verdict

I had a good time with Pac-Man Championship Edition 2, even if it meant I had to wade through a lot of white noise to find it. For every excellent addition like being able to jump back to the start of a map, there are a few that aren’t as well thought out and feel more like limitations than tools for expanding your options. Figuring out the fast-paced puzzles based around all the new tweaks is still a good retro-arcade challenge, but it doesn’t come close to recapturing the magic of the first Championship Edition.